Two conditions must be present to capture maximum value in product pricing. Condition A: Your product provides a benefit the customer values greatly. Condition B: The customer is unable to get this value elsewhere. If you only interview customers, you learn A, but not B. You need rigorous side-by-side testing for B. Few companies do this correctly. Do you?
More in article, 5 Growth Risks You Can Stop Taking (Originally published in B2B Organic Growth Newsletter).
Don’t allow your company to sleep-walk toward its demise. If you face “commoditization creep,” take these steps before the point of no return. Cuyahoga Falls, OH (January 20, 2016) – for immediate release Cuyahoga Falls, OH (January 2016)—Think of your company’s most exciting products—the ones that drive the bulk of your profits. Who invented them? If the ... Read More
If a stock’s P/E ratio is 20-to-1, then only 5 percent of a firm’s value is driven by this year’s earnings. Put another way, 95 percent of shareholder value is driven by investors’ expectations of the future. Executives with rich stock options have “motive and opportunity” to manipulate these expectations… in ways that often damage the firm’s long-term health.
More in article, Why Maximizing Shareholder Value is a Flawed Goal (Originally published in B2B Organic Growth Newsletter).
Think your VOC work is done if you can splash some pithy customer quotes on a PowerPoint slide? Nope. You must conduct quantitative interviews to isolate the important, unsatisfied outcomes (using 1-10 scales). We all “hear what we want to hear”… so unfiltered customer data is needed. Never spend development dollars until someone “shows you the numbers.”
More in article, Why Advanced VOC Matters (Originally published in B2B Organic Growth Newsletter).
If your new product development process begins with “idea generation,” is it your idea… or your customers’? If you start with your idea, you probably won’t understand customer needs until the end… by seeing if they buy your new product. Why not flip your approach and start with customer needs? Unless you’d rather your R&D kept guessing at customer needs.
More in e-book, Reinventing VOC for B2B (page 4).